<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>0:15 clears throat <.>o <.>o okay well <.>we we're going to look at um <,,> word families which i call word families because it's er within the first <,> one thousand words of english and so rather than call it anything else so <.>that that's the main thing now <.>the want to start off by looking at why <,> why study word families <,> and so that gives the motivation for the study why <.>j jerry and i have got together i've got jerry together with me and then to try and see what's the reasons for looking at that and to show you that there's <.>really the really the decision about what a word is in terms of <,> either just <&>1:00 a form or its members really has quite far reaching effects when we look at <.>v <.>v vocab size and we look at language teaching and language learning <,> now the first thing is word family decisions affect measures of vocabulary size so if <.>we if we want to ask the question how large are people's vocabularies and <,> inhales and i like to ask that question <&>1:24 <&>five seconds of laughter <&>1:29 then it's <.>really the ANSWER really depends on what do you mean by a word? because if you say um you know a word includes um only <.>th only the inflectional forms of <.>that of the stem plus the inflectional forms then you get quite a different answer to that question than if you include um voc derivational forms as well just take for example the first one thousand words of english if you take the <.>first the <&>2:00 most frequent one thousand word STEMS of english and then you add the inflectional forms to this and then you add a very limited range of derivational forms then you end up with over four thousand forms for the first one thousand words of english and so in terms of vocab size you can see just for that what the effect of it could be then it's looking <,> not only at people's vocabularies but looking at the size of a text if you say well i want to read this text i'm not a native speaker of english how many words do i need to read this text so how many words are there in this text well then you have that same <,> issue being important again how many words does a dictionary contain laughs that's that's such an interesting question that the er i've been told that the oxford dictionary people leave it up to their publicity people to determine word NO <&>3:00 THAT'S TRUE <,> <.>r robert burchfield told me that and so the number of words in the shorter oxford dictionary er <.>the what's on the blurb disagrees with what's in the introduction by about a hundred per cent so but <.>tha but <.>still so that's a part of it as well and then the next thing which relates vocab size to learning and teaching is what are feasible goals for a second language learning vocabulary development programme so if you're saying well we're going to have these people for x amount of time and we want to do some teaching now in terms of vocab swallows what are the goals of the programme well it's gonna make a big difference whether you decide you're teaching them one thousand words or four thousand words if it's that sort of thing so <.>c continuing with the teaching and learning one then what's the unit <,> of teaching of vocab teaching and vocab learning so if we say we're gonna learn a word or we're gonna TEACH a word or start teaching a word then what's the unit that we're dealing <&>4:00 with <,,> what needs to be TAUGHT do we teach words as items or <.>are are we <.>do should we really be giving a lot of attention to the system which lies behind word building inhales clears throat so if we're teaching items then we have to teach all the derivatives and everything as separate items or do we say well if we teach the stem then their knowledge of the system will take care of all of these other ones therefore we should make sure that they have a good knowledge of the system <,> tut how do people's vocabularies grow okay so what's the role of word building in the growth of an individual's vocabulary so if <,> if er a young child's vocabulary is expanding and expanding how is it expanding is it expanding substantially through the addition of new swallows stems <.>is or is it expanding substantially through the addition of new derivatives of known stems and so on <.>so <&>5:00 so the question of what's a word relates to that and then you get on to even more abstruse issues of how's vocabulary stored and retrieved in the brain so inhales er there's an interesting piece of research which looks at what's the best indicator of speed of retrieval of an item is it the frequency of a form or is it the frequency of the combined members of the word family and the research indicates that actually if you add the frequency of the members of the word family together that gives you a better predictor of the speed at which someone can retrieve <.>an voc any member of that family from their brain than the actual <.>spee the frequency of the form itself so there is <.>some some evidence but we'll come on to that a little bit later so that's sort of the motivation which lies behind it in a general way and in the sort of <.>metholo methodological way there's people doing research on vocab size and on teaching and learning vocab all through the world but they don't agree on what THEY call a word and what <&>6:00 what's a word family and so on and so the idea is that if we can start to define this then the <.>an there'll be no one answer so <.>we're looking at a system of levels and you can say well i'm working with the definition of a word at level six and so that includes all of these things and then we might be able to get some agreement between the different people working on this and we can start to add some of the things together tut another example of the effect of this is some of you might know the thorndyke and lorge teacher's wordbook of thirty thousand words <,> okay if you take another definition of what's a word family and you include a few derivative forms in that then the <.>t teacher's wordbook of thirty thousand words becomes a teacher's wordbook of THIRTEEN thousand six hundred words because simply by adding a few simple word building suffixes and prefixes you reduce the size of that list by half more than half <,> tut okay so that's that any comments on that before we move on to the next one what knowledge do we need to know to <,> make use of word families <&>7:00 <&>one minute and sixteen seconds of questions from audience and replies by QR and others not transcribed <&>8:16 clears throat now <,> in order to make use of this idea of a word family then <.>th there <.>ar there are things <.>that that <.>are a learner needs to know first thing is <.>nee you need to know the stems okay that's pretty obvious er the research in this area has been looking at <.>b using learners age or grade level in school in the american studies <.>to as a sort of inhales an index for this but clearly with second language learners you'd need to have some other way of looking at it and one way which someone might look at is by considering what's their vocabulary size as measured on a vocab size test and then try and relate this to to er knowledge of stems and and then relate <&>9:00 that to knowledge of er the derivatives and so on of the stems so that's the first thing the second thing is in order to make use of this knowledge you have <.>t the learner would have to be able to recognise known stems in words okay and then also to some degree not recognise stems in words where they WEREN'T occurring and um there's voc also <.>research research on that and er i think in the research they call this relational knowledge and there's a indication that learners voc native speakers get quite adept at being able to do this by about the fourth grade which <.>is what's that that's about nine years nine ten years old or something like that <,> the third type of knowledge is to be able to recognise contribution of affixes <.>to that they make when they're added to a stem <,> and <,> there <.>are there's two aspects of this there's a sort of <&>10:00 <.>s <.>some a some affixes add a lexical element so i think something like less and ful add something of a lexical element to it <.>but with the suffixes and then you have a syntactic <,> change often occurring with the addition of a um suffix and then the fourth thing which is something that in <&>pronounced inz the study we're engaged in we're not terribly interested in cos we're really looking at it <.>f from the point of view of receptive knowledge and that's to be able to produce allowable stem affix combinations and so that's really another way of saying it's what they call distributional knowledge in the research and that's sort of sort of say well if you have ness what sort of <.>word what sort of stem can you add ness to and that's another kind of knowledge <,> inhales tut okay so <.>that's so <,> that's er the sorts of knowledge needed now the next um thing is then what we wanted to do was to see can we take the <,> prefixes and <&>11:00 suffixes of english and then by applying <,> criteria divide them into stages or levels starting from <,> the most conservative and then moving up to things which are very ambitious inhales and jerry has done <,> all the hard work on this all i've done is <.>be <,,> er to check it against some other work done by thorndyke in nineteen forty one and to er laughs try and destroy what he's done by cutting out a couple of the levels cos he had ten laughs i thought ten seemed too good to be true so we reduced it to eight <&>11:35 <&>three seconds of laughter <&>11:38 now the criteria then we <.>qui quickly flash through those are looking at frequency so that if we want a <,> we want to look at er <,,> we want to make sure that that if we want to include something in a in a <.>very what do we call it shall we call one a high or two a high level yep if we want to put something in a high level then it's <{1><[1>something which occurs <&>12:00 <.>ver is it okay <{2><[2>then we'll call it a low level then we <.>want we we <.>want we want to include it in er <,,> if we want to make sure it occurs in in lots of <.>it in lots of words and so <.>it it's something which is is common so that's a sort of a <.>fr a FREquency criteria and then you have er sort of criteria which are related to regularity and <.>s and systematicity i guess and so highly productive is a sort <.>of the overlap between frequency and regularity i guess <,> meaning is predictable once the category of the base is known okay <.>that's that's regularity of the system again <,> move the affix <&>pronounced affesk leave the base <&>pronounced beith orthographically intact inhales okay <,> then phonologically intact and so on and i think the criteria are roughly in order of importance too is that right? <[1>word low level elsewhere <[2>laughs <&>13:00 i think that's right yeah roughly in order of importance and so by applying these criteria then we try <.>and we we think we've come to these levels which are over here you've got levels one to eight <,> okay <&>13:13 <&>two minutes and fourteen seconds of questions and discussion by members of audience not transcribed <&>15:27 okay <,,><&>3 good so we look at the levels then so level one each form is a different word <,> okay i put capitalisation is ignored because in one of the word frequency studies the carol davison richmond study actually capitalisation even made a different word in their definition of what was a word so a word completely written in capitals was different from the word which had the first letter as a capital which was different from the word written in lower case and so on <&>16:00